Hellcats Comeback Unlikely

Owen Canfield

Tom Valdiserri, commissioner of the Continental Basketball Association, will be in town today to help drum up interest in the CBA All-Star Game, scheduled Jan. 24 at the Civic Center.

It's good that the Hellcats have been awarded the game in their second year of existence and the management will no doubt do it up right.

Valdiserri will have to deal with other questions beyond the happy, upbeat subject of the All-Star Game. ``Will the Hellcats' second season be their last?'' tops the list. No. 2: ``Will the league take over the team and move it when the season ends?''

No CBA teams make much money. Some break even and call themselves lucky. Others lose a little and keep looking for the sun. The Hellcatslost a whopping $590,368 in the 1993-94 season. The owners, Hartford Sports & Entertainment,are in default of two loans totaling $1.25 million receivedfrom Shawmut Bank, you and me. You and I, in this case, are represented by the Connecticut Development Authority, which provided one loan of $250,000 and guaranteed a $1 million loan by Shawmut.

Attendance is down from last year. This is mostly because the Hellcats began the season 1-11. The team has improved to 5-16 and Tom Drohan, a member and spokesman for the ownership group,says he believes the Hellcats will continue to get better and better under coach Paul Mokeski.

The team is on the rocks and only an infusion of considerable money can save it from going out of business. Drohan says the board would happily step aside and allow a big- money investor to run the show. But potential saviors have been staying away in droves. Frankly, the Hellcats are not, at this point, an attractive investment.

There is little remaining of the high expectations and upbeat feeling that swept in with the team in 1993 when it was first announced the group had been formed and would lease and run the franchise.

Only two of the original board members remain, Michael Kerski, president, and Mike Seaver, who owns Chuck's Steak House. Mark Reich, Richard Cohen and Charles Pious have moved on. Pious resigned from the board Oct. 10 and is suing the groupfor $5,500 that Pious says is owed to him from an $8,000 loan.

They all seemed like good guys who knew they would make no profit but wanted to generate a little activity in the city. CBA basketball is something between the NBA and the top college game that UConn provides, and the group was willing to give it a go.

Because Rich Coffey had shown an extraordinary gift for substituting entertainment for ``down time'' during games and generating ticket sales as general manager in Fort Wayne, Ind., he was hired as Hartford's GM and asked to do it again. I think he delivered. Attendance in the first season averaged 5,003. But, though Coffey was voted executive of the year, he and ``the group'' parted ways after the season. No palatable explanation for this has been forthcoming.

Coffey quit or was fired, and landed on his feet in Shreveport, La., where he became GM and president of the new Shreveport Crawdads.

Drohan says the CBA has informed him it will do anything it can to get the Hellcats through the financial challenge.

``We need the help of fans and businesses,'' Drohan said. ``No question we need corporate support. We understand that everybody is asking [fans and businesses] for money. We appreciate all who have supported the team. We know a lot has been asked of them. But we need more.''

Drohan said he knew of no CBA team that turned a profit in its first year. ``Most businesses experience start-up expenses they don't expect,'' he said. ``We've turned it around to a degree and tightened our hold on our expenses.''

It's a mess. Attendance is reportedly only 3,365 a game without Coffey around and it's going to take a monster winning streak to make the team attractive to basketball fans. The team realizes no desperately needed revenue from concessions or parking and pays as much as $8,000 a game to rent a mostly empty Civic Center. The rent has almost doubled since last season.

There seems to be nobody out there willing to put up the rescue money because the charm is gone, the odds of survival are long and it just doesn't seem like a very good business venture.